Between increasing your system’s audio channel count to 9.1 or 11.1 and upgrading to a bigger, brighter, or even higher-resolution 4K video display, there’s no shortage of ways to take your home theater to the next level. And while such improvements can certainly add excitement, the basic home theater experience still pretty much remains the same.
The thing that most home theaters can’t do is put you into the action, literally letting you feel what is happening onscreen. The sliding of gravel under the tires. The rock and sway of a boat. The thud-thud-thud of a jet being riddled with gunfire. Providing that experience is the role that D-Box fills.
Most people have likely never heard of D-Box or experienced the company’s motion seating, but D-Box has installed seating in theaters around the United States and Canada. (The map at d-box.com/en/movie-theatre/ shows equipped locations.) Now, if you’re thinking “butt shaker,” think again.D-Box is no simple bass-based thump-and-rumble transducer but an advanced system using either 2, 3, or 4 powerful actuators that are capable of very precise, incredibly fast movements that move you frontward and backward, up and down, and from side to side. The actuators provide at least 1.5 inches of travel, enough to create tactile motion and vibration sensations that very realistically emulate what’s happening onscreen.
D-Box’s technology starts out with the motion code the company creates for films: a frame-byframe coding chore requiring hundreds of hours per title. More than 1,000 films have been coded so far, the majority of them blockbusters like Iron Man, Marvel’s The Avengers, the Star Wars saga — generally the kind of films with lots of action scenes, and not those that are based on Jane Austen novels. Many of these are available on Blu-ray and DVD. (The company has posted a complete library of supported titles).
